The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
One topology of a network including packet switching devices is a ring topology, in which packet switching devices are communicatively coupled together to form the ring. Routing protocols are used to exchange information for determining how each packet switching device should forward packets in the network. For example, a link-state routing protocol is performed by each packet switching device, in which it builds a connectivity map of the network. Each packet switching device independently calculates the next best logical path from itself to other destinations in the network based on the connectivity map and the associated costs of the links communicatively coupling the packet switching devices. The collection of best paths will then form the node's routing table, which is used in the data plane to forward packets.